About

Gun violence is a persistent public health crisis in the United States. In New York City, for example, we had the Midtown Manhattan mass shooting in July 2025. It showed us that even our busiest, most protected neighborhoods are impacted by gun violence. First, we will like to analyze which borough has the highest shooting incidents in New York City. Second, we will focus on in Manhattan, NYC, which our campus is located on. We set out to perform a descriptive exploration of neighborhood factors, geographic, and temporal factors that are potentially positively or negatively associated with firearm shootings in Manhattan, NYC.

Map of Manhattan Shootings

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  • Comment: This map shows the distribution of shooting incidents from 2020–2025 overlaid on census tracts shaded by total population from the 2023 ACS. Shooting incidents cluster primarily in densely populated areas of central and northern Manhattan, while tracts with lower population counts show fewer events.

Our Data Sources

Main Data

Shooting data was downloaded from NYC Open Data, with two separate datasets for 2025 data and for historical (2006-2024) data. When combined, the two datasets have a total of 3,103 independent observations across 24 variables. These variables include information such as the age/gender/race of the perpetrator, the age/gender/race of the victim, the day on which the shooting took place, the time at which it took place, its general location (whether or not it was indoors, whether or not it took place within an apartment), and whether or not it was a fatal shooting.

Other Sources

Additional data was required in order to conduct the time analyses, street lamp analysis, and green space analysis:

Time Analysis

  • Data on when sunrise and sunset occurs for each day of the year was pulled from New York City Photo Safari.
  • Calendars for 2006-2025 were downloaded and added to a single excel workbook from General Blue.
  • Weather data from the NOAA was used to measure the temperature for when shootings occurred.

Green Space

  • Census Tract boundaries through TidyCensus R package to geocode and map
  • NYC Parks to identify and locate green spaces

Street Lamp

  • Census Tract Boundaries through TidyCensus R package
  • Street Lamp were used to identify reports of “street light out” service requests

The Team

  • Ainsel Levitskaia-Collins (HL2710)
  • Alissa Shams Orchi (AO2965)
  • Kino Watanabe (KW3180)
  • Miho Kawanami (MK4996)
  • Te-Hsuan Huang (TH3147)

The Screencast

[embed or link to unlisted video]